The Bit Player at Cameo Cinema

The Bit Player

TUE 15 OCT

Coming Soon to Cameo Cinema

92 mins |
Rated
PG-13

In a blockbuster paper in 1948, Claude Shannon introduced the notion of a "bit" and laid the foundation for the information age. His ideas ripple through nearly every aspect of modern life, influencing such diverse fields as communication, computing, cryptography, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, cosmology, linguistics, and genetics. But when interviewed in the 1980s, Shannon was more interested in showing off the gadgets he’d constructed — juggling robots, a Rubik’s Cube solving machine, a wearable computer to win at roulette, a unicycle without pedals, a flame-throwing trumpet — than rehashing the past. Mixing contemporary interviews, archival film, animation and dialogue drawn from interviews conducted with Shannon himself, The Bit Player tells the story of an overlooked genius who revolutionized the world, but never lost his childlike curiosity.

Q&A following the film with the Director, Mark Levinson, Andrea Goldsmith, Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford and Tucker Hiatt from wonderfest.org

About the Director:Before embarking on a film career, Mark Levinson earned a PhD in particle physics from the University of California at Berkeley. In the film world, he became a specialist in the post-production writing and recording of dialogue known as ADR, working on such films as The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain, Seven, The Rainmaker, The Social Network. He is the writer/producer/director of the fiction film Prisoner of Time, about former Russian dissident artists after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He directed and produced the award-winning documentary feature Particle Fever about the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider experiment outside of Geneva. He is currently adapting Richard Powers’s acclaimed novel, “The Gold Bug Variations.”

About Andrea:Dr. Goldsmith has supervised the Ph.D. theses of 24 doctoral students and 20 postdoctoral scholars at Stanford. Dr. Goldsmith has served as PI or co-PI on government research grants totaling more than seventy million dollars and has over 180 journal papers published or in press, two of which have won best paper awards. Andrea's publications have been cited over 60,000 times in Google Scholar with an h-index of 88 and she is in the category of “Highest Cited Authors” in Thompson’s ISI citation index by “ranking among the top 1% most cited for their subject field and year of publication”.

About wonderfest.org:Wonderfest’s Mission is to inspire and nurture a deep sense of wonder about the world. Their public science gatherings in the San Francisco Bay Area and online science discourse aspire to stimulate curiosity, promote careful reasoning, challenge un-examined beliefs, and encourage life-long learning.

In a blockbuster paper in 1948, Claude Shannon introduced the notion of a "bit" and laid the foundation for the information age. His ideas ripple through nearly every aspect of modern life, influencing such diverse fields as communication, computing, cryptography, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, cosmology, linguistics, and genetics. But when interviewed in the 1980s, Shannon was more interested in showing off the gadgets he’d constructed — juggling robots, a Rubik’s Cube solving machine, a wearable computer to win at roulette, a unicycle without pedals, a flame-throwing trumpet — than rehashing the past. Mixing contemporary interviews, archival film, animation and dialogue drawn from interviews conducted with Shannon himself, The Bit Player tells the story of an overlooked genius who revolutionized the world, but never lost his childlike curiosity.

Q&A following the film with the Director, Mark Levinson, Andrea Goldsmith, Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford and Tucker Hiatt from wonderfest.org

About the Director:Before embarking on a film career, Mark Levinson earned a PhD in particle physics from the University of California at Berkeley. In the film world, he became a specialist in the post-production writing and recording of dialogue known as ADR, working on such films as The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain, Seven, The Rainmaker, The Social Network. He is the writer/producer/director of the fiction film Prisoner of Time, about former Russian dissident artists after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He directed and produced the award-winning documentary feature Particle Fever about the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider experiment outside of Geneva. He is currently adapting Richard Powers’s acclaimed novel, “The Gold Bug Variations.”

About Andrea:Dr. Goldsmith has supervised the Ph.D. theses of 24 doctoral students and 20 postdoctoral scholars at Stanford. Dr. Goldsmith has served as PI or co-PI on government research grants totaling more than seventy million dollars and has over 180 journal papers published or in press, two of which have won best paper awards. Andrea's publications have been cited over 60,000 times in Google Scholar with an h-index of 88 and she is in the category of “Highest Cited Authors” in Thompson’s ISI citation index by “ranking among the top 1% most cited for their subject field and year of publication”.

About wonderfest.org:Wonderfest’s Mission is to inspire and nurture a deep sense of wonder about the world. Their public science gatherings in the San Francisco Bay Area and online science discourse aspire to stimulate curiosity, promote careful reasoning, challenge un-examined beliefs, and encourage life-long learning.

The Bit Player

TUE 15 OCT

Coming Soon to Cameo Cinema

92 mins |
Rated
PG-13
| Documentary

In a blockbuster paper in 1948, Claude Shannon introduced the notion of a "bit" and laid the foundation for the information age. His ideas ripple through nearly every aspect of modern life, influencing such diverse fields as communication, computing, cryptography, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, cosmology, linguistics, and genetics. But when interviewed in the 1980s, Shannon was more interested in showing off the gadgets he’d constructed — juggling robots, a Rubik’s Cube solving machine, a wearable computer to win at roulette, a unicycle without pedals, a flame-throwing trumpet — than rehashing the past. Mixing contemporary interviews, archival film, animation and dialogue drawn from interviews conducted with Shannon himself, The Bit Player tells the story of an overlooked genius who revolutionized the world, but never lost his childlike curiosity.

Q&A following the film with the Director, Mark Levinson, Andrea Goldsmith, Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford and Tucker Hiatt from wonderfest.org

About the Director:Before embarking on a film career, Mark Levinson earned a PhD in particle physics from the University of California at Berkeley. In the film world, he became a specialist in the post-production writing and recording of dialogue known as ADR, working on such films as The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain, Seven, The Rainmaker, The Social Network. He is the writer/producer/director of the fiction film Prisoner of Time, about former Russian dissident artists after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He directed and produced the award-winning documentary feature Particle Fever about the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider experiment outside of Geneva. He is currently adapting Richard Powers’s acclaimed novel, “The Gold Bug Variations.”

About Andrea:Dr. Goldsmith has supervised the Ph.D. theses of 24 doctoral students and 20 postdoctoral scholars at Stanford. Dr. Goldsmith has served as PI or co-PI on government research grants totaling more than seventy million dollars and has over 180 journal papers published or in press, two of which have won best paper awards. Andrea's publications have been cited over 60,000 times in Google Scholar with an h-index of 88 and she is in the category of “Highest Cited Authors” in Thompson’s ISI citation index by “ranking among the top 1% most cited for their subject field and year of publication”.

About wonderfest.org:Wonderfest’s Mission is to inspire and nurture a deep sense of wonder about the world. Their public science gatherings in the San Francisco Bay Area and online science discourse aspire to stimulate curiosity, promote careful reasoning, challenge un-examined beliefs, and encourage life-long learning.